


Provenance

by seekwill



Series: Provenance [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Noir, Angry Sex, Art Forgery, Blood, Dubious Consent, Extremely Dubious Consent, He/Him Pronouns For Gabriel (Good Omens), Heist, Knife Mention, No verbal consent, Other, POV Gabriel (Good Omens), Restraining, Rough Sex, The author is into art forgery at the moment, They/Them Pronouns for Beelzebub (Good Omens), cops and robbers, gun mention, physical fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:08:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24414127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekwill/pseuds/seekwill
Summary: “Detective,” they said with a casual air, as if they were a colleague he was passing in a hallway at break.But it wasn’t a colleague. Not, at least, in the traditional sense. Now that his eyes had adapted to the level of the light, he could see them clearly. Slim and small with ragged edges, clad in black, down to the tips of their gloved fingers.Detective Gabriel Bote of the Met’s art and antiquities unit has been chasing Beelzebub Prince - master forger, cat burglar, art heist virtuoso - for years, and he’s finally got them exactly where he wants them.
Relationships: Beelzebub/Gabriel (Good Omens)
Series: Provenance [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1817818
Comments: 46
Kudos: 113





	Provenance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Euny_Sloane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euny_Sloane/gifts).



> For Euny, a brilliant heart.
> 
> Thank you to wonderful summerofspock for the generous beta-ing.
> 
> Please, please, mind the tags.

“Not guilty.”

At the solemn verdict, whispers broke out in the dark, wood paneled courtroom. Gabriel barely noticed over the ringing in his ears. He struggled to keep his face placid, emotionless, and dug his short fingernails hard into the palm of his hand. Who knew who would be looking. Clenching his jaw, his eyes glanced up to the defendant, now cleared, now free again. The corner of their little mouth quirked up for a split second, then returned to a tight, thin line.

_ Smug little shit. _ He sniffed and tried to tune in to what the black robed judge was saying. Words like “reasonable doubt” and “circumstantial evidence.” His tone suggested the judge was disappointed in himself, in his own decision. Gabriel wanted to stand, barrel out of there and then into a cab, to the airport, fly somewhere. Anywhere but here.

They’d gotten away from him again.

Beelzebub Prince. He couldn’t remember the first time he’d heard their name. Fifteen years ago? More? They’d been an artist in their own right. He’d seen their work in galleries in New York, Philadelphia. Their pieces were daring, sometimes terrifying and borderline disgusting. His colleagues from his time in school talked about Prince like they’d be the next big thing in contemporary art. And then, almost as soon as they’d emerged, just before they had the chance to catch the notice of the mainstream, Beelzebub Prince disappeared. 

Nobody talked about it, really. Young artists flamed out all the time. Couldn’t hack it, or afford it. The art world was insular. You had to know someone who knew someone if you wanted to make it.

Even Gabriel, with his Stanford and Cambridge degrees, the backing of wealthy parents, simply didn’t have what it took to be an artist. So he’d turned to restoration, then investigation, forensics, establishing provenance. He hadn’t done a Masters in Art History expecting to end up in law enforcement, but the Lord worked in mysterious ways. Gabriel kept one foot in that world in the way he knew how, and forgot that Beelzebub Prince had ever existed.

Then that name, that unforgettable name, resurfaced as a possible connection to a forgery ring that had farmed out a “previously undiscovered Basquiat” to one of the country's top galleries. So skillfully done it had fooled Southeby’s when it went to auction. It was the Basquiat expert from the MoMA who looked at the piece during a cocktail party, felt a chill run up their spine, and had raised the alarm. The case had made a splash across the art world. The reputations of those involved, those who failed to look closely enough, were in the tank. Gabriel read about it in the Quarterly. Shook his head. How could they have all been so stupid?

The connection to Beelzebub Prince hadn’t panned out. Just a case of being friends with the wrong people. 

But then their name found its way into another forgery investigation. It didn’t pan out that time either, or the next. Each time a piece of supposedly priceless art that turned out to be a fake found its way into a millionaire’s home on faulty provenance, Prince’s name always made its way into the investigation. They would know someone, who knew someone involved. It was never enough to land them, often never enough to even bring them in.

Then came the greater scandals, the museum discoveries. A Manet in the Musée d'Orsay replaced by a reproduction. Curators at the Met discovered their Rothko wasn’t a Rothko at all. The world’s greatest art galleries and museums, one by one, finding cherished treasures replaced by fakes. One name kept rising to the surface: Beelzebub Prince.

Gabriel had been with the FBI when the Getty case came in. Art Fraud Unit. In an internal review, a gallery curator had realized that something about their Cezanne left them unsettled. A forensic investigation showed that it wasn’t the Cezanne at all, but a beautifully rendered fake. It had been Gabriel who had eventually located the original, in the background of a Russian influencer’s instagram photo, taken at an oligarch's resort at an untraceable location in the world’s largest country. The breadcrumbs, again, led him back to Prince.

Beelzebub Prince, once the  _ enfant terrible _ of the east coast art scene was now, what? A forger? A cat burglar? An art heist mastermind? Or, if you believed their increasingly high-priced and shockingly skilled lawyers, no one of any importance at all. The only people who appeared to believe that particular falsehood were the humble people selected for the juries in Prince’s trials, who let the little freak off. Again and again and again.

Prince had become Gabriel’s sole focus. An entire wall of his office was dedicated to their movements. He tracked their friends, showed up where they were bound to be - Los Angeles, New York, Miami. And now, finally, London. He wasn’t Agent Bote of the FBI anymore, but Detective Gabriel Bote of the Metropolitan’s tiny art and antiquities unit. The move had seemed like a good idea at the time. The American justice system had failed him, and the collectors and the museums, not least the artists. Maybe if he did the work in the UK, he’d finally get the results he so desperately craved: Beelzebub Prince behind bars.

Along the way the biggest surprise had been how Prince’s cache developed. He could have never anticipated how the media helped transform them from a criminal to a pop icon for a particular type of unsocialized youth. He remembered the first article in Vice -  _ A Modern Art Robin Hood _ -, as if the proceeds of Prince’s work weren’t wrapped up in drugs, arms dealing, or lining the pockets of some crime family. Gabriel hadn’t expected the fans.

They showed up at the courts. In a courtroom in New York, a woman had stood up mid-trial and screamed “I love you, Beelzebub,” and had summarily been removed. Then there were the ones who held homemade signs of support when Prince left courthouses, a free person time and time again. He’d watched as one young girl reverently reached out and stroked Prince’s jacket, as if they were a saint, and not a master forger and thief with a good marketing team behind them.

This last case, the one he thought for sure he’d nailed, had been a Turner forgery at the National Gallery. He’d connected the dots, made it impossible to let them go. He’d thought, anyway. He’d been so confident.

_ Not guilty _ roared in his ears. He could have spat he was so angry, tore out his own hair, strangled the judge with his own bare hands. And then court was adjourned.

Spectators began to rise. The flock of lawyers in dark suits that surrounded Prince made its way out the courtroom, their client protected on all sides. Gabriel stayed where he sat, not trusting his legs yet, needing the fog of anger to clear. 

He looked up as Prince passed. For a second, half a second, their eyes were on his. The brightest, clearest blue he’d seen in his life, like so much ice. Their face was framed between the back of one lawyer, and the chest of the next. Prince was a head shorter than all of them, almost blocked from view. But he saw them, and he knew without a doubt that they saw him. Time slowed down, the sound of his own breath drowned out the room, tamping down all other noise. 

How many times had the two of them spoken?

In interrogation rooms, where the only thing Prince would ever say was “I’m waiting for my legal representation.” Or when he’d confront them on their own turf, looking ungainly and obvious in front of them, a stiff sculpture rendered from stone while they were modern and shocking, composed of artful dark strokes. Grecian statues and outsider art.

“Charge me with something or leave, Agent Bote,” they’d snarl up at him, blue eyes narrowed and sharp, crooked little teeth bared. Then they’d raise an eyebrow. “Unless you have another question for me, hm? Looking for a commission? Something to hang over your mantle in that big white house of yours?”

Their eyes, their bared teeth, the smoke from their constant cigarette unfurling from their lips made a home in his mind. Tormented him. Made appearances in dreams that otherwise had nothing to do with them. Their rough laugh, their ugly little sneer inspired a kind of fury nothing else ever had. Not even his ex-wife, who had kept that big white house, whose resentment had made it easy to abandon one life for another in a country that would never feel like home.

It was less than a second that his eyes held Prince’s, but it was all there, all that history in a glance. Time was slow. Slow and heavy when their eyes were together, then time picked up its usual pace when they finally passed.

On the threshold of the courthouse, Gabriel watched as the press converged on Prince and their lawyers, watched the misguided teens with badly dyed hair vie for Prince’s attention. (They never gave it; they always acted as if their fans didn’t exist.)

“Detective Bote, do you have a comment?”

He looked over. A tall, gangly kid in glasses with his iPhone thrust towards the detective flashed a press badge for the Times. Gabriel had seen him before at other briefings. Crime reporter. At Gabriel’s stern gaze the reporter nearly dropped his phone.

“Sorry, sorry, em. Do you have anything to say about the court’s decision today?” The reporter pushed his smudged glasses back up his nose with the heel of his hand.

Gabriel glanced down at the phone in front of his chest, hoping to transmit a practiced disdain. “Yes, I think the judge made the right decision.” 

The reporter’s eyes became full saucers. “Do you?”

“No, and you didn’t actually start recording. No comment. Don’t follow me.”

The kid fumbled with his phone and made a noise of complaint directed at himself as Gabriel walked away.

He wandered the busy city streets for hours before going back to his apartment, his “flat.” He stuck to the tourist areas where he could be distracted by shrill voices, chaotic intersections, and navigating between tour groups. 

He’d meant to go back to the office but he couldn’t bear to look at anyone, knew they’d have already heard about another case that had gotten away from him. The boys (and occasional girl) in organized crime, narcotics, weapons trafficking already thought the art and antiquities unit was a joke, as if it wasn’t all connected, as if his work didn’t feed into theirs. He knew that partially, their problem was with him. They thought him too loud, too frivolous, too  _ American _ . He didn’t dress like he was angling for a fight outside a shitty pub after one too many warm beers. He didn’t drink at all, in fact, a choice that other detectives seemed to take personal offence to.

He would always be on the outside. He didn’t want to see what their faces looked like when the golden boy who had been brought over from the colonies had failed to deliver the goods. Again.

His apartment was cold, clean, minimalist. He’d leased it furnished, not wanting to put in the effort to make the space his own. A waste of time. Home would be where his art ended up. And right now all his art was in a climate controlled storage facility in suburban Maryland. He’d thought at one point that he’d find a place here, settle in, ship it over. But who knew, now? Who knew if the Met would keep him on, after this embarrassment. 

Gabriel laid his keys down on the entryway table. Took off his watch and laid it down in line with the keys as he did every day. Those items sat parallel to a small pile of mail he’d been neglecting. The order of it soothed him. His jacket went in the closet. 

From his place by the front door he scanned the room, from the kitchen counters to the bare bookshelves, looking for anything out of place. In case someone had been there.

This habit made his ex-wife call him paranoid. _ You always think someone’s out to get you.  _ But it was just his training. It wasn’t more complicated than that.

The room was the same as he left it. Nothing shifted, nothing different from when he’d left it that morning, and so he moved on to his next post. 

With each step he took towards his nightstand he felt himself calm, the mere proximity to what lay within the top drawer a balm. He settled back onto the duvet, slid the drawer open. It was wrapped in a violet pocket square, one he hadn’t had the occasion to wear for some time. Gingerly, he picked it up. The steel felt cold through the fabric, a welcome coolness and weight in his warm palm.

His gun. The glock 19 he’d had for years, but had never used on the job. Only target practice, only at the range in safety gear. They didn’t let him carry it here, and maybe that was the right choice in the long run. It was hard to justify why a fraud investigator needed to be packing heat. 

A good reason didn’t stop him from missing it, missing the steady weight of it in the holster at his side, lending weight to arguments that only he knew. He missed the confidence it imbued him with. The gun had always felt like power.

Like he did everyday when he came home, he removed the pocket square, checked that the gun was loaded and the safety was on. He wrapped his fingers around the barrel. Sighing loudly for his own benefit, he placed the gun back in the drawer.

In the bottom drawer of the nightstand lay a series of files, which on any other day he would’ve opened by now, held the file in his lap, leafed through the contents. Photocopies of interview notes, evidence reports and crime scene photos. He wasn’t technically allowed to have these things at home, but he needed them. That’s what he told himself. He couldn’t solve the puzzle; he couldn’t nail Beelzebub Prince unless he had all the crucial pieces close at hand. As if in sleeping next to it, it would permeate his dreams and make the connections he couldn’t manage in the waking hours.

There were pictures from all their suspected crimes. Pictures of what Gabriel had come to understand as their calling card - a dead fly on its back, underneath where the swapped painting hung. He’d been the first one to notice it. The pattern. A single dead housefly at every scene. “Lord of the flies,” he’d said to his colleagues, shoving picture after picture in their faces, and they’d laughed until it was clear it wasn’t a coincidence.

His hands twitched at the want of holding the file in his hands. To lay the contents out across the apartment, see what connection he’d missed, what mistake he had made this time. Gabriel had been so sure he had Prince. He’d grasped out at the air before him as they zipped by and briefly held them in his hand, before they’d buzzed away.

He’d chased them to this grey little island and he’d lost them again.

To resist this step of his nightly ritual, looking at the photos, re-reading the notes, felt like resisting the greatest temptation. Perhaps that’s what he needed. He was already halfway to asceticism. It would not be a stretch to deny himself one more thing.

Gabriel didn’t deserve it. He didn’t deserve to be the one to pin Prince. They would always outwit him.

A car horn blared on the street below and Gabriel shook himself from his spiral of self pity. If he were a more dramatic man, more demonstrative, he might’ve slapped himself across the face. Given himself one of those cinematic pep talks in the mirror. Encouraged himself to sleep on it, come back to it in the morning. It was only a matter of time before he found the piece of evidence that would bring Beelzebub Prince and their network down once and for all.

But he wasn’t a dramatic or demonstrative man. He was just a detective, who maybe wasn’t very good at his job after all. 

He stripped, leaving his suit draped over the chair in the corner of the room. Took a shower, the water sluicing in hot rivers over his tight shoulders and back. For the briefest moment he let his forehead rest against the cool tile, a man broken. Then he cleared his throat and straightened his spine, as if he’d caught someone watching. As if there were someone else in the apartment.

There hadn’t been another soul in here since he’d moved in.

He avoided looking in the mirror as he toweled off, feeling old, feeling near decrepit. Like his bones were made of ash, his skin of tissue paper. He’d come apart in the slightest breeze. Each time he lost he knew himself less. The only person he knew, and from a distance, was Beelzebub Prince.

He slipped on a pair of boxers before opening the doors to the juliet balcony to let the air circulate. It was barely 9pm. His eyes drifted to the bottom drawer of the nightstand again, the files. With a shake of his head, he resisted, sat back against the pillows, and turned on the TV that sat perched on the nearly empty dresser. 

He rotated through channels until he landed on a black and white movie, halfway done. He didn’t know it. He didn’t really care. It was just the noise. Words from other people from decades before, crowding out the admonitions, the second guessing, the constant, low-level thrum of failure. Sometime, after one movie ended and another began, he fell into a fitful sleep.

When he opened his eyes next, it took a moment to adjust to the room. The light from the street below just reached in his windows, illuminated the gauzy curtain rising in the breeze coming through the doors to the sad excuse for a balcony. The TV was still on, another black and white movie he didn’t recognize. He groped for the remote on the nightstand and turned it off. The room went dark, except for the light outside. The television must have woken him up, he thought. A commercial, a bang, something.

It was then, as he decided to lie back down, try to make it through the night, that there was movement at the bedroom door. A shadow, quick as a whip. A shadow from nothing. Gabriel shot up in bed, one hand clutching the sheets. He held his breath and listened.

Besides the distant sound of a single motorbike passing by on the parallel street, all was quiet. Had it been a trick of the light? His own nighttime anxieties ramping up in the wake of his hideous day? His chest fell with a long, silent exhale.

Footsteps.

Gabriel threw the blankets off and launched himself off the end of the bed and through the door to the bedroom, eyes wide and searching. He vibrated with adrenaline as he ran to the living room, following rapid, light steps. His heart hammered in his chest, crawling up his throat, threatening to escape his body. 

In the living room, silhouetted against the windows down onto the street, was a person. Gabriel froze, and realized belatedly, regrettably, that he’d left his gun in his nightstand drawer, potentially missing the first and best opportunity he’d had to use it.

The person was breathing hard, as if they’d been running, working.

“Detective,” they said with a casual air, as if they were a colleague he was passing in a hallway at break.

But it wasn’t a colleague. Not, at least, in the traditional sense. Now that his eyes had adapted to the level of the light, he could see them clearly. Slim and small with ragged edges, clad in black, down to the tips of their gloved fingers.

“I would’ve thought Art Cop would’ve had a picture or two up on the wall.” Beelzebub Prince and their manufactured working class accent. In his apartment, mocking his interior decorating skills. “This place is depressing.”

His nostrils flared and he stood perfectly still, tight as a harp string. As if any sudden movement would send them skittering into a dark corner and out of reach.

“Why are you here?” Gabriel asked, his voice shockingly calm and even. For a split second he looked over to the door to the flat. It appeared undisturbed. “How did you get in?”

In the dark, with the light from the city outlining their small form, they snickered. 

Gabriel’s fingers flexed without him meaning them to. He wondered what it would be like to wrap his hands around their neck, feel the blood pumping underneath, feel their breaths shorten as his grip tightened.

Prince released an amused sigh. “You looked so sad after the verdict, Detective Bote. Thought someone should cheer you up.” They held their hands out, palms open and up, looking like a question and an offer and a challenge. “And since we both know you don’t have any friends... no wife. Hmm?”

He could’ve choked on his own tongue. The divorce hadn’t been public, he wasn’t any sort of known figure, but they knew. Like they were keeping tabs.

“Thought I should do the friendly thing,” they said confidently, almost like they actually meant it. “Check up on you.”

“What do you want?” He was well aware he should have made some sort of move by this point, not allowed their presence to glue him to a spot on the floor 10 feet away from them.

“Me?” they asked, and he could imagine them smirking, one ink black eyebrow raising.

“Who else?” he replied, the stony calm coming from a place he hadn’t known lived inside him.

They snickered again, and he wondered what it would feel like to snap their neck with his bare hands.

“I guess I wanted to see what a failure looked like in his natural habitat.”

He yelled as he lunged forward, a primal move, not one driven by training or strategy or skill. His only desire to catch them, to shut their stupid little mouth. Adrenaline raged through him. When he came around the sofa they responded in kind, keeping their distance. 

Their movements were spidery, furtive, quick and nimble. That of an athlete, a mid-tier gymnast. His palms itched with the need to hold them in place. 

Prince vaulted themself over the side table, then slid around the kitchen island. Their hands spread in a fighting stance, their slim shoulders raising with laboured breath. He could see their face now, with its grimace, or grin - he couldn’t tell. Sharp teeth. An animal. 

The angle of their face still shrouded their eyes, and he couldn’t see the startling blue that he knew was there.

Gabriel gathered himself in the place that Prince had only just stood. He pulled back on the reins of his own rage, quieted it, trained it into control. It would be so easy to lose himself in this, to tear the apartment apart in his attempt to get to them. But they could move, they’d just shown him. Quiet and smooth. His mind briefly conjured up  _ Mission Impossible _ inspired images - Beelzebub Prince slithering into the world’s most tightly guarded museums, contorting themself around the sight of security cameras, hopping over trip wires, darting away from hired security. He wondered if they were both the artist and the thief. The ringmaster of the entire circus.

He extended a hand out, as if to still them, as if he had some power, and stepped forward. They tensed but did not move. Their hands on the countertop pressing harder, their elbows hyperextending. He couldn’t tell if they snarled or if their lips just moved that way on their own.

He searched wildly for some words to throw them off, to freeze them to the spot. Something clever and well wrought or in the least bit impactful. But he was blank, his ability to form full sentences absent in the face of their presence, and their solitude, the two of them together. He wondered who else knew they were here, how truly alone they were.

With one hand still held out, he approached the island. The room vibrated, energy and anger prickling at his skin. Prince was still but not still, emanating waves of anxiety in the form of readiness. They waited for him to move, wanted him to strike so that they could slide from his grasp again, make him feel the fool the thousandth time.

Over their shoulder, to their left, sat a block containing knives in various states of dullness, but all capable of plunging deep into his gut. If Prince could get their hands on one, if Gabriel wasn’t quick enough.

Observing the direction of his gaze, Prince looked over their shoulder. Quick as a flash, checking their blind spot. His concern registered immediately. In the blue light of nighttime they smirked, tilted their chin up.

Their eyes caught the streetlight, and were brighter than they should reasonably be. “Please,” they said, some jest in their tone. “I would never be so fucking obvious.”

Again, his id superseded years of training and personal discipline, and he lunged across the island, knocking over a bottle of olive oil, a vase that slipped to the floor and broke into pieces. The move surprised Prince as well and for a moment frozen in time their forearm was clutched in his hand, but they pulled it back, changed the angle and his grasp was empty once again.

They made for the hallway, soft footfalls betraying their speed and with a wordless yell he was after them. They were just out of his arms length, until -

What happened, he couldn’t say. Maybe their ankle rolled, they tripped over their own shoe or the rug rolled up under their feet. For just a second Prince had lost their centre of balance and their course faltered. A second was all Gabriel needed.

His arm was around their waist and they called out in something that sounded a lot like fear. The fabric of their shirt against his bare arm set off fireworks of euphoric victory, ricocheting furiously around in his chest. 

Gabriel shoved them against the wall of the hallway, and heard the air punch out of their lungs with a groan. Here, with his body nearly pressed against him, their size registered in a new way. Their face just reaching the centre of his chest. Their bones, so close to their skin. He could take both of their wrists in one hand and so he did, pressing them tightly against the wall above their head.

They pushed against the restraint and he realized, with joy, that they were weak. Nimble and agile, quick and clever, but weak. In a desperate act, Beelzebub tried to knee him between the legs, but it was clumsy, and he pushed their leg back with his own. 

Their eyes met, his own dark blue to their light, and something twisted in his belly. In them he saw that familiar defiance, but also the unease of, for the first time, not knowing what was going to come next.

He held his free hand in front of their face. 

“I’m going to check,” he started, and he was taken aback by the tenor of his own voice, the false confidence of it, the wretched waver, “if you have any weapons on you.”

Beelzebub smirked. “Ever the professional,” they bit out, “even in your skivvies.”

He swallowed his response, suddenly feeling much more exposed, having forgotten his attire. Thin cotton boxers, and nothing else. He refocused, brought his hand down their sides, across their stomach. He could feel their muscles flutter under his touch, as his fingers slid around the waistband of their black jeans then stopped, at finding something firm and steel.

He extracted a switchblade. Cold metal. He tossed it to the side, hearing it land several feet away on the hallway carpet with a dull thud.

“I thought you wouldn’t be so obvious,” he muttered, his hand skimming the outside of their thighs. Bending down to reach their knees brought him in line with their chest, and his mouth felt dry. Tongue heavy. 

“Is that it?” he asked.

Their eyebrow cocked up in challenge, and it flared the rage in him once more. 

He grabbed their shoulder, made them turn with their hands above them, still pressed into the wall. He ran a broad palm down their back, briefly marveling at the span of it, the narrowness of them. At their tailbone he paused, then lifted his hand and pressed it to the inside of their thigh. There was a sharp inhale, and in the moment he couldn’t tell if it was him or them.

“You couldn’t take all my weapons from me if you tried,” they said with a flagging confidence, their voice was muffled by the wall in front of them.

He quickly ran his hand down the insides of their legs, finding no further weapons, looked down at their ankles. Their clothes were skin tight. They couldn’t be hiding anything else.

As if they could read his mind, they laughed. It came from the back of their throat, accompanied by some false bravado. “You’re so fucking stupid. It’s my mind, you idiot.” They sniffed and he almost rolled his eyes. What a line. “My mind’s the weapon.”

“Yeah, I got that,” he said.

Their head turned to the side and he could see their profile. As he traced it with his eyes his breath left him. Their little nose, high cheekbones. This close he could see the shallow pockmarks on their skin, that he’d never before noticed. Acne scars. They looked lavender in the dark. If he were still an artist he would have tried to capture their cheek in the shadows on canvas. People would ask if it was a work about beauty in imperfection, and he wouldn’t know what to say.

Their blemished cheek twitched, and they smirked, looking at him sidelong. They let out a small huff of air. “Or was all this just an excuse to finally get your hands on me?”

“Fuck you,” he barked, heated and sharp before he could stop himself. His hand shoved into their back, pushing their chest forward. He felt as if he had been caught out. 

He had only been protecting himself, following procedure. If he had hit them then, hurt them, it would’ve been understandable. A criminal in his home who’d had a knife on them. That he’d disarmed them had been doing them a favour. A kindness. 

They exhaled in surprise, but their eyebrows rose, and there was something in Beelzebub’s expression that looked unsettlingly like triumph. “Did that cut a little close, Detective?” 

The two of them shared a moment of silence. Their breath together in shallow waves. He half considered sinking his hand into their hair and smashing their face into the wall, breaking those pointy little fangs they called teeth. Instead, his hand flattened against their spine. He began to lose his mental footing.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Beelzebub’s voice had left victory and had taken on a sort of casual surrender. “I’m surprised I didn’t come in here and see every news article ever written about me cut out and pasted to your walls. Red string trying to connect the dots.”

His hand tightened on their wrists and Beelzebub adjusted their shoulders in the small range of motion that they had. Were they hurting, sore, stiff, he wondered. What would happen if he dropped those hands? He almost cracked a smile at the weakness of his own resolve. They would leap for that knife and bury it in his femoral artery before he could blink. Leave him to bleed out on his hallway floor in his fucking underwear. 

“You’re obsessed with me.”

Their taunt brought him back to their face. Back into the moment, and his defensive hackles raised, even though they could barely move. 

“Shut up,” he said, his voice dropping into a deeper register. He said  _ shut up _ , because in that moment, he knew he couldn’t deny their assessment in any convincing way.

"You're pathetic,” they continued. Their small tongue darted out to wet their lips. Then they laughed, quiet yet high pitched, incredulous and scared. Then their next words were slow, deliberate, meant to unsteady him. “You could have any woman in the world and yet the only  _ thing _ you want is the little freak that keeps embarrassing you.”

His hand balled into a fist in the centre of their back. Pushing. 

“They think you're a workaholic but it's not that, is it? It's not work you're addicted to.” They looked at him. He looked at them. Then they said, louder, with some intimate knowledge, “It's me, slipping through your stupid fingers."

“I said  _ shut up _ .” Gabriel’s voice shook, danced on the edge of a whisper. Where the fight in him had receded to, he couldn’t say. Still, he held Beelzebub in place, his hand unfurling again. Through their shirt could feel the dips and valleys of their narrow ribcage. Their breath made it expand into his palm then recede. Some part of him, some quiet part he had been steadfastly ignoring for years, felt fed.

They were right. They were right and it made him sick. All this time he had fallen asleep dreaming of them, their work, their movements, their eyes. His wife had been jealous, not of the work, but of Beelzebub Prince, of the space they took in the marriage, in Gabriel’s mind. He’d abandoned a life he’d fit into for one that he didn’t in pursuit of them. They made him crazy. He wanted to crush them.

Instead, he leaned down and pressed his nose to the space behind Beelzebub’s ear, inhaled their scent. It filled his mouth, his head. Stale cigarettes and the city and turpentine and finally, shampoo. He could’ve choked.

Beelzebub Prince was a person who washed their hair. Not a monster, a creature of the underworld. A person. A person who was angling their hips back into him, revealing he was growing hard in his boxers, with them held in front of him. 

His breathing hitched as their body grazed his. He looked over to the curve of their cheek. 

Gabriel’s hand curled around Beelzebub’s rib cage and onto their stomach where the muscles jumped under his touch. He did not know what was happening, could not tell what part of him was controlling his limbs. It barely felt like a choice. He paused, waiting for them to move, to scream to try to get away. They didn’t.

With a low, nearly silent moan, his hand slid down over the waist of their pants, catching on the denim, on the button that laid flush with their belly and came to rest between their legs. Slowly, he pulled them back to him, and curled their body into his. His hand still held their wrists tight against the wall.

His nose against their temple, his lips. This was what madness felt like. It must be. A sane man wouldn’t do this. A sane man would’ve pinned their arms down and called for backup. Not molested them, not held them against him and wondered what it would be like to touch his tongue to their pulsepoint below their jaw.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” whispered Beelzebub, their face next to his, their eyes closing. “You’re obsessed. Blew up your whole fucking life to come to this country to put me behind bars and you couldn’t do it.”

In the face of their goading the only thing he wanted to do was hold them. He had them now, didn’t he? 

“What can you do right, Detective? Are you good at anything?" In spite of the words it sounded like an embrace. An invitation.

He could show them. He could show them what he could do. His hand between their legs shifted up to their fly and with deft fingers he undid their jeans, the scratching sigh of a zipper opening the only sound to accompany their breathing. In a decision that he should’ve considered longer than he did, he released the hands held above their head, dropped his own to come around them, press into their belly, hold them tight. Beelzebub left their hands against the wall, pressing their palms flat. The hand on their belly rose and fell with their breath.

He pushed the hand at their fly into their pants, felt the mess of hair there. He found their cunt with his fingers. Their wetness was shocking and he felt it in his very bones. He almost released them, almost backed up, ran from what he was doing. Their moan stopped him.

Their openmouthed moan that came as his fingers found the place between their folds. Dripping and slick. Their body jerked as their swollen clit slid between two of his fingers and it was the first time it seemed that they weren’t in control.

The sound that came out of them, the way their body convulsed gave Gabriel the gift of some limited clarity. He could see outside of himself finally, and into them. Into maybe what was going on in their mind, the one he had been trying to understand, crawl into, for a decade.

"I'm obsessed?” he asked, rubbing a finger against their clit and speaking right into their ear in a low hiss. “Where are we, Prince? You're here, in my home, in the middle of the fucking night. To fight with me? I could break your little neck if I wanted. No, no. You wanted this, sweetheart.”

He plunged a finger into them and Beelzebub cried out. He moved the hand on their stomach up to their mouth. Pressed two fingers onto their tongue. Beelzebub’s hands dropped from where they had held fast to the wall in front of them, onto his wrists. They didn’t try to pull his hands away, their fingers just barely able to wrap around him. Their lips closed, and their teeth came down. But it wasn’t to bite him. It was to keep him there.

Gabriel rubbed his face into their dark hair, groaned as he pushed into their cunt deeper and they mewled around the digits in their mouth. “It's you as much as me,” he murmured. “If it weren't for the money you keep raking in, I’d say you keep running these schemes just to get my attention."

He rutted up against their back, cock aching, and fucked them with his fingers in earnest. Their cunt clenched around him and he cursed under his breath. The insanity of this moment, of the culmination of years and cases and anger. This heat and this overwhelming want that nipped at the back of his throat.

It had always been at his heels. He had always outrun it until now.

To say he surrendered to it would be a falsehood. As if it were some outside force that made him pull his fingers from Beelzebub’s mouth and anchor his hand in the hair at the nape of their neck and direct them down to the carpet, where they landed on their hands and knees. He did not surrender to his want. He just gave himself the permission he had been salivating for without knowing. Would've never known, had they not been here, in this hallway, in the middle of the night with him.

Gabriel settled onto his knees behind them, leaned back on his heels and quickly, roughly, pulled down their jeans, exposing them to the night. He could just see the outline of what he’d traced, breached with his fingertips just moments before, of what he never dared imagine or even dream of. He could swear he could smell their sex, heady and ripe, and he’d never wanted and been repulsed like this all at once. 

He had the distinct feeling of being at a crossroads, and of being drawn towards the darker road, the one laden with disaster. He let himself be drawn. There was no resistance left in him.

Shifting down his boxers, Gabriel took his cock in hand, and he ached in want of relief, in want of them. He slid his other hand up their side and their face turned over their shoulder, to look at him, eyes wide and jaw set. They were the picture of defiance, but simmering underneath it was the thrum of desire.

Or was he kidding himself? He looked into those eyes the colour of a glacier, his breath coming in short, shallow bursts. He couldn’t take this back.

Their lips curled into a sneer, not the least bit afraid of him

With a low growl, a primal thing, he pressed forward, looming over them, the head of his cock at their opening. Pushing into them, Beelzebub’s eyes widened and rolled back, and they cried out. The sharpness of it almost made him pause, but he knew what fear sounded like, what pain sounded like, and that wasn’t it.

He watched their cunt stretch around him, tight and hot, pulsing. He covered them, their back, as he leaned forward. His hand beside their gloved hand on the floor, bracing himself as he used the other to shove up under their shirt and grope their barely there tits. Under him like this, they felt tiny and hollow boned. He moaned, and the sound of it was wanton and wet.

He thrust into them without grace or finesse or rhythm. He was all clumsy need and shame. Something mixed in his belly - the horror of this want and the ecstasy at his achieving it. This longing and lust overlapping with the wrongness of it.

“Gabriel, ah!” His name spilled from their lips and it sounded like a plea, a request. Not at all like  _ Detective _ , snarling and smug. He searched his memory for a time they had said it before, maybe in an interrogation room, a courthouse. If they had, the syllables spoken in their voice hadn’t stitched themselves into his skin like what was happening now. He knew, with a rare clarity, that the gasp of his name would ring out in his ears for the rest of his ugly life.

He tried out their name in his mouth, “Beelzebub,” and it untethered the last bit of him that was held back and he thrust into them so that they shook, so that his legs ached. He was possessed by something beyond him, a black magic curse that wouldn’t let him stop even if he tried. 

They tightened around him and a shudder ran up his spine. His fingers searched for, found, their nipple. The responding moan had him pressing his face into their hair. The way their back arched up into his chest made him crazy, the way their elbows shook with tension made him want to fuck them until they collapsed in on themself. He wanted to sink into them, wrap all of him around all of them and never leave this.

“Wanted this, didn’t you?” he hissed into their ear, because sparring was what he knew, even when he was buried inside them to the hilt. “Came here for it. Came here for me.”

Under him, Beelzebub shook their head. A lie. He knew, he could feel it.

“Liar,” Gabriel choked out. “You’re a liar.”  _ And a thief, and a criminal, and I’m going to put you behind bars _ , he wanted to continue, but the words failed him. He splayed his hand across their stomach, fucked them harder, and felt their muscles tense beneath them

Beelzebub was wailing, a rough-edged keen unlike anything he had ever heard, needy and desperate and angry. They rutted back into him, harder and harder, the slap of his hips against theirs coming in faster and then the sound that tumbled out of them was wretched and guttural and he realized that they were coming.

He felt delirious in the moment, in the way they felt around him. He forgot himself then, though he’d been lost from the moment he’d touched them. He forgot himself and the circumstances and as their cunt pulsed around him, he released. He pressed them tight to his chest and he curled around them, his mouth breathing hard onto their temple. The groan that rolled out from his chest was raw, exposed.

In the seconds after, all he could hear was their shared breath, a suspended, quiet moment before-

Beelzebub pulling away felt like falling into a lake of frigid water. He was shaken from the trance they’d put him in, or he’d put himself in. The chill ran down his limbs as he watched them pull up their trousers, their fingers shaking on their button and fly. Automatically he tucked his cock, still sensitive, and wet with their slick back in his boxers. His own hands were unsteady.

That chill that still buzzed in his fingers and toes was fear. Fear of what he was capable of, of what he’d just done. Fear of what he wanted. 

When he brought his eyes to their face, it was not what he expected. There was an open, wounded quality to it. In the blue light it was wet with tears, spit. They were just a person. Just a person moving to shaky, untrustworthy knees.

A surge of something he hadn’t known lived within him spurred him forward, and he kissed them. His hands buried in their hair. Beelzebub didn’t respond immediately, seemed frozen by the suddenness at which his lips had come for theirs, but then with a frantic whine they wrapped their arms around his neck, and kissed him back. 

The moans they made into his mouth were almost sweet. Sweet enough that he could almost pretend that he didn’t force down their pants, hatefuck them into the carpet. He could pretend they were on some different plane, where what he was feeling in this moment would not be wrong, would not be in opposition to everything he had built himself to be.

The illusion shattered as they pulled back, panting, began to peel his hands off their face. They all but leapt to standing and backed away from him. Their back hit the couch and they jumped like they hadn’t been expecting it to be there. They drew their sleeve across their mouth, wiping it. Gabriel stayed on his knees. 

His hand reached for them, without him asking it to. He pulled it back, the shock settling in on his own face.

Beelzebub’s face was transformed. “Oh, Detective,” they said, with a smirk that bordered on a sneer. Whatever openness had been there, whatever person had kissed him just a minute before was gone. “It’s so much worse than I thought.”

He wanted to stand, couldn’t. He felt as if Beelzebub had plunged a knife into his chest, wrenched open his ribcage, and held his beating heart in their spindly little fingers.

“You're not just obsessed with me. You're in love with me."

The air was gone from the room. Beelzebub shook their head, a wry laugh twisting its way off their tongue to land dead between them on the floor. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move.

"Who punished you, Gabriel? What God did you piss off?"

And then the way they looked at him was with such pity that he could barely stand it. He made another move to push himself up. If he could only reach his full height he’d find himself again. His arms and legs refused to comply, cowed by the furious energy coming from his enemy, who he had just been inside.

“One day,” Beelzebub started, their shoulders set, the corner of their mouth quirking up, “I’ll fuck up. We both know that. Put a foot in the wrong place, recruit someone who squeals for cops. I’ll make a mess of things. And you’ll know where to look, Detective. Because you know me, don’t you? You know me.

“You’ll know where to look, and you’ll finally have everything to fucking pin me. And you won’t.” They laughed. “Because you love me.”

His heart in their hands, squeezed into a filthy pulp.

They were right. Maybe he’d already done it. Maybe he’d seen something that could have helped an investigation and he dismissed it out of hand. Maybe he hadn’t asked the right questions and chosen instead asked the wrong ones. Maybe he let them slip through his fingers because if he caught them, he wouldn’t have anything to look forward to.

Beelzebub walked forward to him, somehow knowing he wouldn’t move. They pulled off one of their gloves and placed one thin finger under his chin, and he could feel the scratch of their nail on his skin. Their eyes narrowed, then they flashed that smile full of sharp teeth. They leaned down and their breath ghosted hot over his skin, bright blue eyes still red rimmed. “We should do this again sometime.”

In those split seconds, he would have let them slit his throat. He would have thanked them for it.

Then they were past him, down the hallway on light feet and his body came back to him. He lumbered to his feet and ran after them, his legs only half cooperating.

In the doorway of his bedroom, he was presented with an image that burned itself into his retina like the too bright flash of a camera. Beelzebub stood at the open door, their back to him. Their hands clasped around the railing of the useless juliet balcony. They looked over their shoulder at him. The breeze blew in the curtains and they fluttered around Beelzebub’s legs.

One breath. Two.

With an uncommon grace, they hoisted themself up and twisted their body to sit on the railing. It wasn’t much of a railing, and the balance must have been precarious.

They looked to him and tilted their head, their little face mostly victory, and some loss.

“Goodbye, lover,” they said, and tipped backwards and out of sight.

“Motherfucker,” he said to no one and ran to the railing. He looked down to the street below, and there was no one. No broken body on the pavement, no getaway car. He craned his head to the left and right looking for levers, pulleys, ropes, and there was nothing out of place. Feeling more than a little hysterical, he looked up. Just a grey sky, reflecting the light of the city below.

He stepped back, blood roaring in his ears, and closed the balcony door.

He continued back until his knees hit the bed and he collapsed back onto it. Touching his finger to the place their nail had scratched under his chin, he was met by his own stubble. No broken skin. No evidence. It was like they’d never been there.

With the back of his hand, he felt his own forehead. He must have dreamed this. He was sick and he was hallucinating. Otherwise how would this have happened? How would they have found their way into his home, submitted to him, and then told him that he loved them? How could he have thought they were right? How could they have just vanished into thin air?

That he was sick seemed the only answer.

For a time he lay there on the bed, until his breathing came back to normal, until he felt human. He needed water.

In the hallway, his foot came down on something cold and metal.

He looked down at their knife. They’d left evidence, after all.

The knife was a simple thing, he could see now. There was nothing exceptional about it. No engravings with pithy sayings, nothing so obvious as their initials. He held the cool blade against his palm and walked back into the bedroom, water forgotten.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Gabriel flicked the knife in and out, in and out, relishing the swift swish of it snapping back into place time and time again. He wondered what Beelzebub had done with that knife, if they had sliced through the frame of an old world master, cut the twine that held the painting rolled up and out of sight. Perhaps they’d gutted someone who threatened them.

Beelzebub wasn’t stupid. They never would have left it behind by accident. They knew he would hold it in his hand, hold the proof of them, and say nothing.

Gabriel clicked open the knife again and observed how the light reflected off the sharp edge of it, entranced. Possessed, he flicked the needle thin tip into the pad of his left pointer finger. The blood rose and welled, ran down to the palm of his hand.

He was awake.

**Author's Note:**

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